Luis Tapia
(2018). The Production of Local Knowledge: history and politics in the work
of René Zavaleta Mercado, trans. Alison Spedding, London: Seagull Books,
456 p.

Felipe
Lagos Rojas

Seattle Central College &
International Institute for Philosophy and Social Studies

Argentinean
José María Aricó (1931-1991) and Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado (1938-1984)
hold a leading place among Latin American radical thinkers; however, they are
still limitedly known elsewhere. The recent translations of Aricó’s Marx and
Latin America and Zavaleta’s Toward a History of the National-Popular in
Bolivia into English come to build some bridges in this sense, alongside
other recently published scholar works on Aricó (Martín Cortés’ A New
Marxism for Latin America) and Zavaleta (Luis Tapia’s The Production of
Local Knowledge). This review argues that these elaborations provide important
perspectives to understand the contemporary global conjuncture.

Desencuentros
of Marx(ism) and Latin America

Aricó is a
decisive figure of socialist debates in Latin America, not only for his writings
but also for his organization and editorial efforts. Tireless contributor to
the diffusion of Marxism across the Spanishspeaking public, an insightful
overview of his life and work can be found in Martín Cortés’s article in the
“Classic Revisited” section of this volume. Arguably, Aricó’s paramount
contribution to these debates is Marx and Latin America. Published in 1980, in Lima, and republished in 1982, in Mexico, with
an important epilogue by the author, the English translation is based on FCE’s
2009 Mexican edition, thus including Horacio Crespo’s introductory study. The book
itself comprises eight sections for the main argument and nine appendixes delving
into texts and topics related to the Marxist tradition.

The main
purpose of this work is to explain Marxism’s overlooking of Latin America’s
reality, as the latter has proved irreducible to the former’s universal historical
schemes. For Aricó, the question is “to give account of a reality that is, to a
certain extent, ‘unclassifiable’ in the terms in which Marxism has historically
been posed qua the predominant ideology within the socialist movement” (p. 3). Therefore,
the singularity of the region vis-à-vis capitalism and the theoretical straitjackets
of Marxism’s universalistic pretentions are identified as the two terms of a
long-lasting desencuentro. The Spanish word desencuentro cannot
be directly translated into English and refers not to the absence of encounter,
but rather to a clash of forces or opinions –being thus akin to
misunderstandings or disagreements. Importantly, a desencuentro relies
on the possibility of an encounter.

Aricó
analyzes the customary explanation for this desencuentro: Marxism’s
alleged Eurocentrism. He identifies a bias toward the systematization of the
critique of political economy along scientific lines within both Marxism and
Marx’s thought itself (pp. 13-15). This –he goes on– has amounted to the
deployment of a “philosophy of history”, a universal grammar in which advanced
countries indicate the road to the backward ones. Yet Aricó proposes another
way of reading Marx, demonstrating that his late writings sustain a more
indeterminate, open stance on historical evolution, at a time when closer
attention is paid to the relations between development and the so-called backwardness.
Aricó concludes that “[u]nderdevelopment plays out a function of the
development of the metropolis”, thereupon “a series of elements fundamental to
the elaboration of a ‘phenomenology of underdevelopment’” (p. 19) was firmly
established in Marx’s thought.

If
Eurocentrism is not the explanatory factor, why then, when looking at Latin
America, did not Marx make use of such perspective? What were the “obstacles
that prevented Marx from seeing something that he had to see”? (pp. 27-8).
For what reasons did Latin America remain an “evaded reality” (pp. 1, 27) to him?

These
questions are addressed by Aricó from a reading of from Marx’s “Bolívar y Ponte”
(Appendix Nine), written in 1858 on demand for the New
American Cyclopedia. It is an “anomalous” text (cf. Kraniauskas, 2015), to
the extent that it undoes Marx’s own progressions (cf. Anderson, 2010). The
article offers an uncharacteristically Western-centered picture of the independence
processes, in which Marx qualifies Bolívar as a minor Latin-American Bonaparte
in a gesture that relegates the region’s events to a repetition of Europe’s political
history. The role of European elements is also overemphasized in the explanation
of the campaigns, since “like most of his countrymen, [Bolívar] was averse to
prolonged exertion” (Marx, as cited by Aricó p. 105). In short, Marx proposes
the image of Latin America as a place of irrational, repetitious events, away
from the historical rationale around capital that he helped to grasp.

Aricó’s
ultimate answer relates Marx’s blindness to the twofold presence of Hegel.
Firstly, in the silent but identifiable notion of “non-historic peoples” (pp.
58-9) –populations considered unable to make history; hence history is made for
them. In second place, Marx famously inverted Hegel’s model of determination:
whilst in the latter civil society is produced by the state, according to Marx,
a strong civil society produces its own state. Aricó argues that Marx’s
universalization of this criterion “had the contradictory effect of clouding
his vision of a process characterized by an asymmetrical relation
between economics and politics” (p. 61), a process “so noticeable ‘from above’”
(p. 63) –from the state.

The utmost
consequence of this model of determination, Aricó concludes, is that it forestalls
the possibilities to think, from Marxism, about the specificities of
processes whereby neither ‘normal’ transitions to capitalism nor strong capitalist
classes have taken place. By questioning its universal validity in describing
any given capitalist society, Aricó finds a way to depart from economic
determinism and launches a timely invitation to consider the relative autonomy
of the political from a socialist viewpoint.

Abigarramiento,
and the virtues of ‘local’ knowledge

Zavaleta grew
up in the midst of Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution and its aftermaths. His trajectory
is usually described in terms of three successive moments: (1) an initial adscription
to revolutionary nationalism that included his participation in the new government
and ended with a fierce criticism of this ideology (a stance reflected in his
1967 book, The Formation of the National Consciousness); (2) a brief
moment of ‘orthodox’ Marxism (represented by his 1974 book, Dual Power);
and, finally, (3) his last period of creative “heterodox” Marxism that
culminates with his unfinished work Toward a History of the National-Popular
in Bolivia, published posthumously in Mexico by Siglo Veintiuno, in 1986.

The
forthcoming 2018 publication of Zavaleta’s Toward a History… and Tapia’s
The Production of Local Knowledge will allow the English public a view
of the former’s most mature work, accompanied by what is, in my opinion, the
most comprehensive scholarly work of his entire oeuvre. Tapia argues that a
hallmark of Zavaleta’s thought is the pursuit of “local knowledge” –that is,
knowledge of what remains historically specific in the midst of the capital’s
worldwide generalization.

Zavaleta
addressed concerns similar to Aricó’s. However, while the latter questioned the
Marxist theory’s ability to come to terms with the region’s particularities,
Zavaleta departs from the question about the possibilities of “underdeveloped”
working classes making creative uses of Marxism. He posits the problem
elsewhere, when referring to “the subsumption of scientific socialism […] into
the concrete reality of a socioeconomic formation which is capitalist only hegemonically
and sometimes upholds the capitalist mode of production only as an enclave”
(2013a: p. 388).[1] In
turn, this question demands from the materialist historian a closer look into
the actual, historical (rather than theoretical and logical) process, which by
far overrides the working class alone.

The concept
of abigarramiento significantly captures Zavaleta’s approach. The adjective
abigarrado [motley] is defined by the Royal Academy of Spanish Language
as the displaying of various colors, particularly when they are oddly matched
or not matched at all (2013a, p. 388).[2]
Its nominalization (abigarramiento) can be rendered as “disjointedness”.
To Zavaleta, Bolivia’s most salient trait is the non-unification of society or,
at least, the dissimilar value of the penetration of capitalist unity in its
sectors, which is what abigarramiento refers to (…) [i.e. the]
disconnection or non-articulation between [productive] factors” (2013b, p. 521,
emphasis added).[3] Accordingly,
abigarramiento refers to the uncombined coexistence of different modes
of production and worldviews within a country. Like Aricó, Zavaleta understood that
the bulk of Marxism was premised by an ideal-type figure of capital
totalization that projects a “normal” trajectory molded by countries of
“classical” transitions to capitalism (England, France). Meanwhile, abigarramiento
emerges from the contrast that non- or ill-totalized societies provoke upon
such an image, whereas considering them as capitalist societies all the same.

Zavaleta’s Toward
a History... was conceived as a project of writing Bolivia’s history of abigarramiento
against the grain of state narratives of unification by analyzing “the formation
of the national-popular in Bolivia, that is, the connection between […] social democratization
and state form.” (p. 1) Social democratization is a term borrowed from Max
Weber and refers to the extent to which the juridical equality among free
individuals has been accomplished. Accordingly, it would be more accurate to
speak of a “disconnection” between such dimensions, since Zavaleta’s account of
Bolivia’s national-popular movement arises precisely from the mismatch between
material and juridical inequality and the state’s claims of representative democracy.

In its
projected finished form, the book would contain an introduction and four chapters,
whereas each chapter would address a particular moment of crisis (also called
“constitutive moments”), starting from the War of the Pacific and the loss of
territory against Chile, and culminating in the 1952 Revolution and its
aftermath, which lasts up to Zavaleta’s final days. Unfortunately, this chapter
has never been written (unlike the others). And yet, Toward a History... is
not a historiographic, but a social-science exercise, so each of these
constitutive moments is addressed by means of audacious theoretical displacements
that shed further light upon the non-articulation between Bolivian sociedad
abigarrada and “its” state.

Analyzing
Bolivia’s crises, Zavaleta also discloses crucial epistemic ruptures. Particularly,
Chapter 2 revisits the interoligarchic Federal War of 1898-1899, focusing on
the instrumentalization and subsequent slaughtering of Indigenous – chiefly
Aymara–uprisings. These events, and the fear they have awakened, had as a
consequence the adoption of social Darwinism as state ideology; therefore, Zavaleta
makes visible that the fear of the “Indian hordes” relies on the foundation of
Bolivian modernity (pp. 158, 163-4, 223, 294). Mutatis mutandis,
“[c]risis can be understood […] as a moment when things appear not as they are
experienced […], but as they truly are.” (p. 17) The crisis is thus an instance
of totalization or synthesis (even if virtual, potential) of nontotalized societies
such as Bolivia, insofar as “the moment of crisis, in its results or synthesis,
[…] constitutes the only phase of concentration or centralization [in] a
formation that otherwise would appear only as an archipelago…” (pp. 17- 8)
Crucially, this concentration moment is envisaged as a space of encounters for
those disjointed modes of production and worldviews that, in “normal” times, compose
the archipelago’s isles.

Think
local, act global: translating abigarramiento worldwide

Is it
possible to translate the concepts of desencuentro and abigarramiento
into contemporary use? In my view, they concretely delineate a much-needed renovation
of Marxism’s apparatus, starting from the fact that both are premised on careful
attention to the unbalance between universal and particular, “local” claims. The
reflections that have shaped these concepts are propitious to productive developments,
perhaps today more than at the time of their own elaborations –as they were
made still under the hegemony of an identifiable Marxist “orthodoxy”. Moreover,
they can be of singular relevance to observe a conjuncture in which global neoliberalization
has arguably altered the North/South divide in a decisive yet still uncertain
manner. In this context, the traits of sociedades abigarradas are
increasingly visible at the very core of “advanced” capitalism. In what can be
seen as a sign of global abigarramiento, the related phenomena of
migratory crisis and new struggles for quality-citizenship and social rights
are skyrocketing all over the world. In an important sense, abigarramiento can
be instrumental in terms of intersections without abandoning Marxism.

Zavaleta
recognized that lo abigarrado posits further difficulties for the
ability of subaltern classes to articulate organic forms of solidarity among
themselves. In this regard, Martín Cortés (2015) proposes that Aricó’s category
of desencuentro envisage a renewed modality of theory making. Insofar as
it embraces a potential encounter, a desencuentro calls for a form of
theorization following the model of translation: translation always presupposes
production of a novelty in the encounter with an object of analysis; the
opposite is the application of closed concepts that achieve a reality
considered as an established unity. (p. 34).[4]
The translational model takes into account the specific forms of reception and assimilation,
but also of equivocation, that any cultural or knowledge exchange imposes. In
doing so, it prevents mere projections of universal grammars upon disjointed
realities, at a time that allows a focus on the very nature of the exchange.

Proposing
exchange and mutual determination instead of patronizing the imposition of
allegedly universal schemes, the translational dimension brought about through desencuentros
can be of value for the contemporary crisis of representation that
accompanies global abigarramiento.

Bibliography

Anderson,
Kevin (2010). Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western
societies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.